Death Note is the kind of show where you try to watch one episode, but end up losing an entire weekend to its exhaustingly-tense cat-and-mouse chase, and you aren’t even mad about it. Despite some poorly-received plot choices in the middle, it’s an intelligently written, smartly paced and consistently engrossing series that’s being made into a live-action film on Netflix on August 25, but you should probably watch the anime first (it's streaming on Netflix and Hulu) anyway, even if you don’t tend to like anime.
For those who’ve never heard of it (minor story spoilers to follow), Death Note is a 2006 anime adaptation of a 2003 manga that follows the story of Light Yagami, a high school student who happens across a supernatural notebook that grants him the ability to kill anyone, any way he likes, just by writing their name in the book. Light, considering himself a vigilante, tries to use the book to ‘cleanse the world of evil’, and effectively plays God, which leads an incredibly skilled detective to try to hunt him down. It’s not easy to find someone who can kill someone with natural causes without even being near them, but the book does have some important rules and caveats, and so the cat-and-mouse chase begins.
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For those who’ve never heard of it (minor story spoilers to follow), Death Note is a 2006 anime adaptation of a 2003 manga that follows the story of Light Yagami, a high school student who happens across a supernatural notebook that grants him the ability to kill anyone, any way he likes, just by writing their name in the book. Light, considering himself a vigilante, tries to use the book to ‘cleanse the world of evil’, and effectively plays God, which leads an incredibly skilled detective to try to hunt him down. It’s not easy to find someone who can kill someone with natural causes without even being near them, but the book does have some important rules and caveats, and so the cat-and-mouse chase begins.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...